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How to make a split

In simplest terms, a split is made by dividing an existing colony into two or more parts. Many variations exist. In fact, the methods of making splits—and the reasons for making them—are as varied as the beekeepers who do them.

The most common reasons for making splits are to:

While there are many different ways to do a split, you must follow of number of guidelines if you expect success.

  • Use overwintered colonies. A brand new colony from a nuc or package does not have the resources needed for a good split.
  • Use strong colonies. If you split a weak colony, you get even weaker ones—if any. The larger the colony, the better your chance of success.
  • A split will need a queen provided for it or it must be able to produce a queen.
  • If you expect a split to produce a queen, drones must be available. The more drones actively flying, the better.
  • If you expect a split to produce a queen, it must also have fresh eggs or newly hatched larvae, plenty of nurse bees, pollen, and honey.
  • The brood nest of a split must imitate normal nest structure—worker brood in the center, drone brood on the outer edges of the worker brood, pollen on both sides of the nest, honey on both sides of the pollen.
  • A split needs protection from robbers in the form of a reduced entrance or robbing screen.

Even when you do everything right, a split won’t always succeed. If after a few days there is no sign of queen rearing, you will need to add more fresh eggs or newly hatched larvae. If it fails a second time, it is best to recombine the split with another hive.

The easiest type of split is made by using a populous hive where the brood nest spans two brood boxes. The beekeeper simply takes off the top box and puts it on its own bottom board, adds a lid, and walks away.

But even that simple form of split requires some attention for success, especially if you don’t know where the queen is:

Finally, here are some additional considerations, regardless of the type of split you make:

  • When splitting the hive and dividing resources, concentrate on the number nurse bees, not the number of foragers. If you are splitting within your own apiary (or within a two-mile radius of it) the foragers will return to their original hive or to the split that contains their queen. Try to ignore these foragers and concentrate on the number of nurse bees that will be in each split. The nurses are the key to making the split work.
  • You can put splits side-by-side, no problem. Just remember that for a long time, the part without a queen will look like no one is home. Gradually, as nurses become foragers, the discrepancy will decrease. Don’t let the number of foragers in the one part freak you out. If the split is raising a queen, everything is working according to plan.
  • Remember to provide adequate honey (or syrup) and pollen (or pollen supplement), especially to the part with few foragers. Since that part doesn’t have a workforce collecting materials from the field, it may need extra supplies to raise that first batch of brood.

Even though it sounds complex, don’t be afraid to try this. It works amazingly well, allowing you to both increase the number of hives and raise your own local queens. At the bottom of the page on the “Splits” tab on the main menu are links to several different types of splits you can try, and later this week I will be adding another.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Should you trust your bees to Phil?

Saturday February 2 was Groundhog Day, one of my favorite celebrations. First thing I did was look out my window to see a bleak and dreary northwest morning. I announced to my husband that spring was just around the corner because that is the way the groundhog thing works—opposite of what you might think. If the groundhog sees his shadow, we will have six more weeks of winter weather; if not, spring is close.

Of course, Phil doesn’t live here in Washington, he lives in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. But being a Pennsylvania girl myself, I always play along. According to news reports, thousands of people arrive in the small town every year to witness the event. And guess what? No shadow this year. Spring is coming.

It was interesting though, because by 12:30 the sun had arrived in my yard and bees were pouring through their reduced openings. They circled above the hives, dipped and spiraled, congregated on the landing boards. It is unusual to see so many honey bees this early in the year. Maybe they were celebrating Phil’s finding or maybe they were desperate to use the facilities.

Apparently, the same weather pattern hit Tennessee. Herb Lester, my correspondent for all things bee down there, sent these hive photos. Same thing: the morning was bleak, but by afternoon the hive was clearly casting a shadow.

But here’s the catch, regardless of whether Phil is right or wrong, honey bees this active in February are going to burn through their honey stores with the speed of light. If you are having an unusually warm winter, if your bees are actually flying, do not forget to check on them every couple of weeks. More colonies die of starvation in the late winter/early spring than at any other time of the year. Remember, never trust your bees to a 126-year-old groundhog.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Early on Groundhog Day: no shadow. Photo by Herb Lester Apiaries.
Early on Groundhog Day: no shadow. Photo by Herb Lester Apiaries.
Later on Groundhog Day: sharp shadow. Photo by Herb Lester Apiaries.
Later on Groundhog Day: sharp shadow. Photo by Herb Lester Apiaries.

To gleefully bludgeon a beemudgeon

I dearly want to poke this guy in the stomach with his own hive tool, over and over again until light dawns in his pea brain . . .

Yesterday I wrote about the new beekeeper whose rip-roaring hive was throwing swarms like tantrums—one right after another. Using sound beekeeping principles she had raised a boisterous hive that grew too big for its own comfort. After the third swarm, she opened the hive and found both deep brood boxes crammed with honey—something she hadn’t expected.

I explained to her that checkerboarding the brood boxes early in the season would have relieved some of the congestion and broken down the honey barrier. I discussed some other techniques for swarm management as well. But in the meantime, she’s talking to her neighbor:

[A] beekeeper I talked to suggested that I created the hive congestion in the first place by wrapping the hive during the winter. He said it kept the bees too warm which resulted in less honey consumption which then left less space for the queen to start laying in the spring. What do you think?

What I think I cannot publish here. What I will say is this guy is a beemudgeon. A while back I wrote about the Seven types of beekeeping advice to avoid. Number 6 describes this guy to a T:

Be wary of curmudgeons, or let’s call them beemudgeons. These are people who give advice that contradicts whatever you are currently doing. They are know-it-alls who know nothing and get attention by saying the opposite. If you change, they change. They breed faster than mites and hang out in places where they can inflict the most damage.

Can you see why I have periodic falls from civility? This guy is saying it is her fault the bees swarmed because she took good care of them. Reading between the lines, he is saying that if she just starved them half to death they would not be vigorous enough to throw swarms. And if that’s not bad enough, he says that warm bees don’t eat as much as cold bees when we all know the opposite is true—there’s nothing like a warm winter to cause bees to burn through their honey supply faster than the speed of flight.

There’s not a beekeeper on earth who wouldn’t be pleased to have a strong colony with a good supply of honey in the spring—not even this guy. But since he’s a beemudgeon, he has to say the opposite: she is an inept beekeeper because her strong overwintered colony has too much honey. What???

Give me that hive tool!

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

The catch-22 of beekeeping

Hey Rusty,

I started my first hive last year in early May from a swarm given to me by a local beekeeper. I did not harvest any honey, and I had to re-queen in October. Following your advice (quilt box, follower boards, HopGuard, etc.) I successfully overwintered the hive.

We had a warm, early spring and the hive was active. I inspected, reversed the deeps, fed sugar syrup with HBH for a week or two until things started blooming, treated with HopGuard, inspected again, and observed a big increase in population.

The first week in May I added a medium super. The next week they swarmed (size of a basketball). The following week they swarmed again (size of a basketball). Yesterday they swarmed again (size of a football).

There are still bees in the hive, but I haven’t inspected yet—postponing my disappointment, I guess. What should I have done early on? What should I do now?

[name withheld]

Swarming is the perfect catch-22. According to Wikipedia, a catch-22 is a “paradoxical situation in which an individual cannot avoid a problem because of contradictory constraints or rules. Often these situations are such that solving one part of a problem only creates another problem, which ultimately leads back to the original problem.”

As beekeepers, we do everything possible to make our colonies strong, robust, and healthy. If we succeed at that, if we do everything right from a colony-health perspective, the colony will be ripe for swarming. Colony reproduction (swarming) is something that healthy colonies do—it is not the province of the weak or struggling.

The logical thing to tell the writer is, “Sweet! You did everything right!” But of course that is not what she wants to hear. As a matter of fact, she is probably feeling like a failure, which makes no sense whatsoever if you look at it from the bee’s—or nature’s—point of view.

It is hard for us to think of swarming as a victory because what we want is different from what bees want. We want them to stay put so they don’t bug the neighbors. We want them to stay put so we can harvest lots of honey. We want them to stay put so we can start new colonies and raise more colonies that will also stay put.

Of all the strange ideas that exist among beekeepers, the most perplexing is the notion that “if your bees are happy, they will not swarm.” That is nonsense. A happy, healthy, robust colony is going to want to do what every other happy, healthy, robust organism wants to do—reproduce. If bees didn’t swarm throughout the millennia, bees would no longer exist. Why is that so hard to understand?

But back to our writer . . . You have to hand it to her—she raised an awesome batch of bees. To prevent, or at least limit swarming, the standard recommendations include reversing (which she did), checkerboarding, pyramiding, splitting, and re-catching. Also, good hive ventilation—screened bottoms, ventilated covers, and slatted racks—seems to be of some help.

As for what to do now, my recommendation is to wait a week or two and then check for eggs and larvae. Sometimes, especially after multiple swarms, the original colony is left without a viable queen and with little brood. If there is no fertile, egg-laying queen after two weeks, she should probably introduce one or risk losing the colony.

In this case, I think the beekeeper was unprepared for her own success. She came into spring with a stronger-than-expected colony and didn’t realize the bees would run out of room so quickly. But that is okay; it’s all part of the learning curve. Beekeeping cannot be mastered in a season or two; it takes more like years. And even then, there is always something new, something unexpected, something catch-22 ready to catch you.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Measuring the bone pile: death in the hive

Yesterday I pulled the screened bottom board out of my top bar hive and dumped it. What seemed like an incredible number of moldy bees mixed with pollen and comb dropped heavily to the ground. It made a wet thud, like a saturated mop hitting the deck.

Cleaning the unappetizing stew of deadlings off the bottom board is a rite of spring. Although it can be disconcerting to a new beekeeper, it is nothing to be alarmed over. Here’s why:

An average colony going into winter may contain 50,000 bees. An average overwintered colony stirring in spring may contain 20,000 bees. So where are the other 30,000? Well, a goodly number of them are in that pile; others were carted out of the hive by ambitious house bees during the winter months. You saw those on the landing board and in front of the hive in the snow.

If the hive appears healthy and active then the pile of dead bees is just—well—a pile of dead bees. Clean it up, put the hive back together, and forget about it. Everything is going according to plan.

Rusty